Immigration Reform’s Last Best Chance

Greg Sargent has been more bullish than most when it comes to comprehensive immigration reform’s (CIR) chances in the House. But when I read this report from him on how reformers plan to nudge the GOP caucus towards ignoring the Hastert Rule and allowing reform to come up for a vote, I’m less than encouraged. As Sargent reports:

It continues to be widely accepted that there is no chance comprehensive immigration reform could ever get through the House. But proponents of reform are not prepared to give up. And they are putting together a plan designed to win over individual House Republicans — one by one — by mobilizing constituencies within their districts to make an economic and moral case that reform is necessary not just to solve the immigration problem, but for the good of the economy and the country….

The idea is to identify major businesses — farmers, growers, tech companies — in the districts of individual Republicans and get them to make the case to their Members of Congress that immigration reform is necessary for the good of the local economy. In other words, the idea is to make this less about what major business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or big agricultural groups want and more about what their individual members want of their own Representatives. The notion that reform is being orchestrated by big business and “big ag” groups is a rallying cry against it for conservatives.

The plan seems to be founded the truism that all politics is local. And there’s no doubt still a lot to say in favor of that view. But when it comes to high-profile legislation like CIR, the kind of legislation intimately tied-up with the president’s legacy — something House Republicans are not inclined to burnish — I’m far from sure that local political pressure is enough to overcome the national activist base’s agenda. I mean, it’s all well and good for Anytown, USA’s local business leaders to urge reform; but that pales in comparison to the threat of being called out by Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin.

The other problem with the plan is that it assumes Republicans in the House care enough about governing to accept ideologically inconvenient solutions. For example:

What unifies the message that will be pushed through these channels is the idea that immigration reform is not just a means to fixing a broken system that has left millions in the shadows; it’s also necessary to improve the economy at the local and national level. As such, the case will be made that only comprehensive reform will do, for the sake of all the different groups that would benefit from it, and for the sake of the economy overall.

After more than two years living under this Tea Party Congress, I think we can assume that unless it can be done through orthodox conservative means — chiefly, cutting spending on the poor and lowering taxes on the wealthy — Republicans are uninterested in improving the economy. Their faith in their own prescriptions is too ironclad to allow any other approach. Technocratic appeals simply won’t work.

Simply put, nothing in Sargent’s report leads me to believe that the basic legislative dynamic of the past few years has changed. So long as the president is in favor of something, House Republicans will oppose it. And if that something happens to be strongly opposed by the most hardcore members of the GOP activist base, the chances for cooperation shrink from minuscule to infinitesimally small.

And while I hope I’m wrong, I believe all the clever Congressional micro-targeting in the world won’t change that fact.

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Elias Isquith is a freelance journalist and blogger. He considers Bob Dylan and Walter Sobchak to be the two great Jewish thinkers of our time; he thinks Kafka was half-right when he said there was hope, "but not for us"; and he can be reached through the twitter via @eliasisquith or via email. The opinions he expresses on the blog and throughout the interwebs are exclusively his own.

9 Responses

For what it’s worth, I think you’re right. There’s no way comprehensive immigration reform is going to make it through the House. It was a dead letter during the Bush administration. Given the even more reactionary nature of the Tea Party Congress, the only kind of immigration reform I can imagine passing is building the biggest fence possible and putting guards every couple hundred feet.Report

Still, it’s good that the Dems and more thoughtful GOPers in the Senate passed something and delivered it to the house to die. The only way the overall issue will move is if clarifying failures like this occur and help demonstrate the respective parties positions. I don’t see the GOP coming out of this looking good.Report

Given the even more reactionary nature of the Tea Party Congress, the only kind of immigration reform I can imagine passing is building the biggest fence possible and putting guards every couple hundred feet.

Oh, I don’t know, the House would probably be willing to make at least minor policy concession in exchange for automated poison dart guns, electrified concertina wire, and a series of alligator pits.Report

“After more than two years living under this Tea Party Congress, I think we can assume that unless it can be done through orthodox conservative means — chiefly, cutting spending on the poor and lowering taxes on the wealthy — Republicans are uninterested in improving the economy. Their faith in their own prescriptions is too ironclad to allow any other approach. Technocratic appeals simply won’t work.”

You forgot ‘pork for the well-connected’ and ‘selling off public assets’.Report

Well, the Republicans are the only people standing in the way of the eventual minority takeover of the existing Democrat Party by conservative Catholics, based on Census Bureau projections. Sure, there might be a few liberal Democrats left in office in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, or New Hampshire, but that will be about it.Report

“reform is necessary not just to solve the immigration problem, but for the good of the economy and the country”

This is justifiably understood to be a dubious assertion by the working class opponents of CIR. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was billed as a get tough scheme, 27 years later it’s seen as an amnesty program. I doubt that House Republicans motives are pure but there is a working class constituency that rightfully thinks it has been sold a bill of goods when it comes to immigration and trade policy.Report

It's funny how browsers I think are a thing (specifically Vivaldi and Brave) don't even register on this list. Goes to show my techie bubble.

Browsers used to have better names. Netscape was brilliant. What the heck is a Firefox? (It's "Firebird" with IP considerations is what it is.) Chrome? Edge? Edge? Come on.

It's amazing how quickly Chrome accomplished what Firefox never did. It just goes to show the power of corporate muscle. When Google announced they were creating a browser I thought it was kind of dumb. I was wrong.

People say Firefox is better than Chrome now but I just can't get into the groove of it. Chrome doesn't work right on one of my computers and I use Firefox on it. it's passable, but I wish Chrome worked on it.

With Internet Explorer being replaced by Edge and Edge being Chrome-based, that means may be looking at 3 of the top 5 and 85% of desktop browsing occurring through Chromium browsers. That's concerning.

The ship's presence, he speculated, might have been related to the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

Did Trump tweet anything about this, you ask?

The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian “Skyfall” explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!

As some of you know, I lost my father two weeks ago. My mother called me that Friday afternoon and said, in not such direct words, that “you better try to get up here if you can.”

I did, but I was too late. But in the aftermath of it, it was good to be there. My mother and I ate together for two weeks (my brother and his family are coming in later, such are the vagaries of scheduling bereavement leave in a government agency). We cooked some favorite things. My mom roasted a chicken and then laughed ruefully and said “I guess it’ll be harder to use a whole one up now” and the day after that, we made a favorite chicken enchilada recipe given us by a former minister of her church who had lived in the Southwest. And she baked a favorite cake of ours (my father was diabetic and we had to be careful about sweets in the house, and also baking was hard while he was so unwell). I think it helped, maybe?

There’s a German word, Kummerspeck, which literally means “Grief-bacon” and is used to refer to the weight you put on while grieving. I had scoffed at that before because the more minor griefs (eg., breakups) I had suffered made me NOT want to eat…..but I know I’ve put on a couple pounds in the last two weeks and will have to explain to my doctor when I go in for my checkup on Tuesday….

And people brought in food – lasagna, and bread, and other things.

And we went out to eat lunch a couple times; before my father’s health failed so much going out to restaurants was a favorite thing and my mom hadn’t been able to do it, really, for six months or more while he was needing her care.

When I spoke to her today after I got home, she noted that even though she had told the ‘church ladies’ who do bereavement lunches she didn’t want them to go to the trouble for the memorial service this fall (we have some people with some specific dietary concerns coming), someone did call her back and suggest a dessert-and-coffee reception before the service and I urged her to have them do that – I have fixed things many times for funeral lunches at my own church and it feels very much like it’s one kindness I can do for the family, and having a piece of cake or a few cookies may make small talk easier in a time when it’s going to be hard.

I admit I always rolled my eyes over the “how to relate to your weird dumb relative who isn’t like you” pieces, or, worse, the “you should refuse to spend time with them or try to harangue them into your viewpoint over the Thanksgiving table” pieces, because my family has a lot of….different…..people in it, and we’ve always managed. You talk about other stuff, that’s all. You talk about how a favorite team is doing or the funny things someone’s kids are doing or you share memories….

Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire financier and accused sex trafficker, is dead by suicide, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

The officials told NBC News he was found at 7:30 a.m. ET at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York and that he hanged himself.

Epstein accuser claims she was ordered to have sex with prominent men

He was transported Saturday morning from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a hospital in Lower Manhattan. Upon arrival, he was in cardiac arrest, people familiar with the matter say.

Epstein, 66, was being held on federal sex trafficking charges.

He was arrested July 6 in Teterboro, New Jersey, as he returned from Paris on a private jet.

He had pleaded not guilty and was denied bail.

The indictment on his case showed that he sought out minors, some as young as 14, from at least 2002 through 2005 and paying them hundreds of dollars in cash for sex at either his Manhattan townhouse or his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, federal prosecutors revealed last month.

Epstein was charged with one count of sex trafficking conspiracy and one count of sex trafficking. He faced up to 45 years in prison if found guilty.